Obituary: Joey Paroxytone
Joey Paroxytone, that infamous musician of the 1980’s, passed away today at his Santa Barbara, CA home. He was 82 years old.
Mr. Paroxytone had been pigeonholed into the field of linguistics at an early age by his teachers, who misunderstood his last name for an expression of his interests. Joey rebelled against the entire study of linguistics, and especially paroxytone words. People who knew him were always exclaiming, “My! Joey sure uses a lot of proparoxytone words!” Notice the extra “pro.” Those are completely different words than the ones he had banned from his mouth.
But this constant linguistic rebellion had left Joey obsessed with the accents on words. When he began his musical career, this obsession carried over into his music. Critics were always taken by the unexpected accents and sudden sforzando in his compositions. This led some mean-hearted critics to call Joey the “Ultimate Paroxytone Composer,” which infuriated Joey to no end. Not the least of which was that Joey didn’t know if they were simply talking about his last name, or if they were using it to describe his compositions, which would have been an accurate use of the word. Ironically, despite his proclivity for proparoxytone words in regular conversation, had his music been dialogue it would have been almost entirely made up of paroxytone words.
This led to his antidynamic songs of 1986, featuring absolutely no dynamics or accents whatsoever. His manager was furious that he had abandoned such a successful and unique style, and quit on the spot. His debut adynamic album, Laaaaaaaa, was so coldly received by the critics as well as his fan base that he abandoned that previously untapped vein of musical expression almost immediately. Apparently it had been untapped for good reason.
Unfortunately, at this point Joey sank into a deep depression. He couldn’t express his true music thoughts for fear of the paroxytone label. He considered changing his name briefly in the early 90’s, but a cease and desist letter from actor Joey Lawrence caused him to give up on that idea.
Joey made a brief but highly successful comeback in 2005 with an experimental math-rock gangsta rap hybrid style that also made heavy use of sforzando. While his songs were very popular, once his MTV audience saw that he was 81 years old, they immediately burned their albums in protest. It also didn’t help that this new audience had difficulty remembering or correctly pronouncing his last name.
Joey is survived by his son Byttuen, 50, and daughter Whatsinanameanyway, 47.